My review essay honing in on William Safire's Political Dictionary also showed up on Sunday in the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

It begins like this:

Words are the most familiar part of language, because it's words we're most conscious of learning and forgetting. Only certain words, though. Your word-of-the-day calendar will never list "the" or "but." You boast about knowing French numbers, not the pronouns. What draws our fascination is the words for things, actions, properties and the other stuff of the world, not archaic prepositions.